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It is true that legality is not morality, and sticking to the law is necessary for good citizenship, but it is not sufficient.

Julian Baggini

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Julian Baggini
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: September 9
Author
Philosopher
Writer
Necessary
Law
True
Legality
Good
Sticking
Citizenship
Sufficient
Morality

More quotes by Julian Baggini

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True humility is expressed in deeds, not words. The humble are those who truly walk the same ground as everyone else - not necessarily with grovelling, hunched backs, but certainly not lording it over others, either.
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Trying to keep up with health advice can feel like surfing the Net for weather forecasts: what you find is always changing, often contradictory and rarely encouraging.
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The modern believer is not suspicious enough, which is perhaps why when they try to construct arguments in their defence, the convictions are left doing all the work and reason, debilitated by neglect, weakly fails to prop them up.
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Constructive complaint requires only two things: that what you are complaining about should be different, and that it can be different. It sounds simple, but too often our protests fail this test.
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Justice can only be dispensed when you have all the facts in front of you.
Julian Baggini
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There are many things you shouldn't measure. Don't, for example, try to measure how much you love your wife!
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I think that a lot of social movements, political movements, powerful ones - certainly they form, collectively, an idea of the truth which becomes hard to question. It becomes a dogma, and from the inside it starts to look like common sense.
Julian Baggini
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As a teenager, I increasingly had questions about religion to which I found no good answers.
Julian Baggini
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If we now find ourselves looking down on the cheap and convenient, it is only because we now have better things which are affordable.
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Yesterday's news feeds our fear that our neighbours are more likely than not to be bad eggs: benefit fraudsters, bogus asylum seekers, paedophiles or jihadist terrorists.
Julian Baggini
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I am only me for practical purposes.
Julian Baggini
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If I hammer my own thumb while doing some DIY, it's not nice, but it's not the end of the world. To care obsessively about similar levels of discomfort in animals seems to be a case of mistaken moral priorities.
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Being able and willing to complain is what makes us rational and moral animals, capable of seeing and articulating the difference between how things are and how they should be.
Julian Baggini
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Waiting is so unusual that many of us can't stand in a queue for 30 seconds without getting out our phones to check for messages or to Google something.
Julian Baggini
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The optimist underestimates how difficult it is to achieve real change, believing that anything is possible and it's possible now. Only by confronting head-on the reality that all progress is going to be obstructed by vested interests and corrupted by human venality can we create realistic programmes that actually have a chance of success.
Julian Baggini
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Stress means something different if it is the result of rewarding work rather than struggling to keep the family out of debt.
Julian Baggini
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True virtue would never liken its rewards to points on a loyalty card, not because it is its own reward, but because it is not something we should practice to accrue future benefits.
Julian Baggini
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Science works because the phenomenon being described can be relied on to remain the same. Even in quantum physics, where phenomena are changed by observation, the way in which observation interferes is regular and falls within a limited range of possibilities. Human culture, however, has the nasty habit of never staying the same for very long.
Julian Baggini
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When you try to translate any kind of real-life problem into a neat logical form, you're almost always simplifying it. We need a kind of blend - we need to use not just tools of logic, which are important and valuable - I'm not denying that, but also tools of judgement, and of inductive and abductive reasoning which can also inform.
Julian Baggini
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Philosophy is at its most engaged when it is impure. What is being recovered from the Ancient Greek model is not some lost idea of philosophy's pure essence, but the idea that philosophy is mixed up with everything else.
Julian Baggini